Recently, I came across a click-bait piece of written garbage titled, â15 Thoughts Every Guy Has When Dating a Bigger Womanâ that made me very angry. I wasnât going to link to it here anyways because every click raises the profile and profitability of a piece that should have never been written in the first place but I am happy to report that thanks to the efforts of a group of dedicated individuals writing emails to the site where it was published, the piece was taken completely down. But Iâll sum it up for you because this fatphobic messaging is everywhere and combating it is important.
In the first three paragraphs plus size women are called âspecial snowflakesâ and âpleasingly plump.â The author says things like âbeauty is in the eye of the beholderâ and âwho are we to judge?â ironically before he writes a long-winded generalized heteronormative judgement about plus size women.
The author gives props to men who care about âhappiness over appearances.â This assumes all of our partners are men and implies that a fat person could never also be attractive. I recognize that desirability is political and rooted in bullshit beauty standards, but itâs still so tiring to see fat and ugly used interchangeably when they donât mean the same thing. This whole idea of âhappiness over appearancesâ is insulting both to us as plus size women and also to the people who love us. And while it upsets me that our partnersâ attraction and individual choice is questioned, it bothers me more that our humanity is never even considered.
The list itself is as bad as you would imagine. Fat women are great cuddlers. They make men feel more confident about themselves because obviously if they are fat then he is the more attractive one (even if he is also fat). They are funny. They are eager to please. They donât get jealous and they never have a hard time picking where to eat. They are fat so obviously; they donât have any likes or dislikes or thoughts of their own apparently about how a relationship works. They are just so-gosh-darn-grateful to have a date at all.
This list reads exactly the way society wants it to. Itâs every fat funny single best friend trope rolled into one. And as an attractive, sometimes jealous, non-funny fat girl who always has a hard time deciding where to eat, Iâm pretty over being lumped into these generalizations like Iâm not an individual person. The author paints a picture of a sad fat girl just eagerly awaiting some dumpy dude to come along and bring her to a restaurant she didnât even get to pick out. It all reminds me of the time I was told on a first (and last) date to âdress upâ only to end up at Benniganâs and where my date told me not to order the steak even though I had told him I was a vegetarian. I cringe now thinking back on it but bad dates happen to people of all sizes. That treatment was never a reflection of my worth and it doesnât mean thatâs all I deserve as a fat person.
On the same day I read this list, I posted an image from the that read, âFat Girls Can Do Whatever They Wantâ and someone posted a comment in response that read, âUnless itâs finding a decent guy to accept her as she is. That this fat girl canât do.â I read it and my heart broke a little. Because this wasnât some click-bait list-maker who believes every fat woman is a Rebel Wilson character, this is a fellow fat woman struggling to find acceptance where she should find respect, love, and mutuality. And my heart broke because Iâve been there. I believed that settling was my only option and that the attention of men would mean that I wasnât the sad fat girl I was always assumed to be. I believed that having a man would prove people wrong. But it wasnât a man who saved me or saw my worth. It was me.
I realized that the attention of a man does not and will not ever validate my fat existence. The most loving and caring partner does not validate my fat existence. I am valid with or without anyone elseâs affections or approval. And you are too. Your partner should not tolerate or accept your body. They should love it because itâs yours and youâre pretty great and also, there is nothing wrong with your body.